Monday, July 24, 2017

The Library of Congress opened its catalogs to the world. Here’s why it matters

Library of Congress | Online catalog | Research

The
Library of Congress has made 25 million digital catalog records
available for anyone at no charge. Photo by Flickr user casajump

Imagine you wanted to find books or journal articles on a particular
subject. Or find manuscripts by a particular author. Or locate serials,
music or maps. You would use a library catalog that includes facts –
like title, author, publication date, subject headings and genre.

That information and more is stored in the treasure trove of library catalogs.

It is hard to overstate how important this library catalog information is, particularly as the amount of information expands every
day. With this information, scholars and librarians are able to find
things in a predictable way. That’s because of the descriptive facts
presented in a systematic way in catalog records.

But what if you could also experiment with the data in those records
to explore other kinds of research questions – like trends in subject
matter, semantics in titles or patterns in the geographic source of
works on a given topic?